If you’ve been blogging for any length of time, you’ve probably experimented with some external blogging clients.  I’ve tried a number of them over the years, yet always seem to go right back to Wordpress’ admin when I want to post.

But for the next little while, I’m going to experiment once again and give the various blogging clients a try. After all, they do have a lot going for them… from spell checking, browser integration, and the ability to blog to multiple accounts without opening a new browser window.

Today I installed Deepest Sender, a blogging client for Firefox.

Deepest Sender installs like any Firefox plug-in. Its effortless and comfortable for anyone who has ever added plug-ins to their Firefox installations before. This also means that updates will happen effortlessly, as Firefox will prompt you when new updates are available.

Once you’ve installed Deepest Sender and restarted Firefox, you’ll need to set up some accounts in Deepest Sender. To begin, start the editor by either using the Deepest Sender menu item from the Tools menu,  or typing CTRL+\ on your keyboard.

You’ll be prompted through a very easy new account wizard to set up your first Blog. Deepest Sender will work with LiveJournal, Blogger and Wordpress blogs, and should be adaptable to any other platform that uses the metaWeblog API.

Once you’ve set up your blog, you can log in and make a test post. You”ll notice that unlike many other blog editing tools, this one doesn’t leave unasked for links at the end of your posts. Yay!

From the main editor window, you can see your post in either WYSIWYG format, which is “Normal”, in Source mode, which will show you all your tags, and in Preview mode, which will show you, hopefully, what your finished post will truly look like, title and all.

You can choose  which category you want to place your post in from the drop down box at the upper right.

Adding posts to your blog is very straightforward. Simply type away, adding links and text styles with the built-in editor, then post.

Deepest Sender does not yet have a way to upload an image from the editor to your blog. It only accepts the image URL when you choose the image icon from the toolbar,  so if you want to use an image in your post, you’ll need to make sure it’s already online somewhere.

My only other complaint is that Deepest Sender does not include a way to add tags to your posts. I rely heavily on tags, and adding relevant tags to posts has greatly increased my search engine rankings for many keywords, so I am loathe to give them up.

In summary:

Pros:

• Fast and easy install and upgrades
• Offline editing ability
• Access to all your blogs from one place
• Nice WYSIWYG editor
• No extra advertising or links added to your posts
• Free!

Cons:

• No image upload function
• No place to enter tags

Also on my wishlist would be a way to post-date posts, but that’s not a deciding factor for me.

Overall, Deepest Sender is a very nice tool, but I’m not sure it’ll work for me at this point since I almost always use my own images (uploaded via the Wordpress image uploader) in my blog posts, and I always use the Tags fields that Wordpress and Blogger provide.

I’ll keep the plugin installed, though, and check it out each time there’s an upgrade, since I’m sure it’ll be changing for the better with each new version.

So far in this series we’ve created a way to redirect prospects sent by affiliates to oodles of different product sales pages from one clickbank account, and created custom affiliate URLs to ensure that affiliates are linking to your site, not Clickbank’s, for their affiliate links.

Today I want to solve on other problem I have with Clickbank.

When you run an affiliate program through Clickbank, you do not know who your affiliates are. All you know is their Clickbank ID.

I don’t really need to know their mailing address or the name of their pet canary, but it would be nice to have their name, email address and Clickbank ID.

It would be nice to be able to email affiliates about any special offers they could promote to their list.

It would be awesome to be able to send out an email to all my affiliates when I’ve got a new product.

Having a ready made list of people who might promote a new product is much more advantageous than starting from 0 affiliates with each product and hoping that a few folks will find it in the Clickbank marketplace.

And should I ever want to abandon Clickbank and move to a different affiliate management service, I would definitely want to tell all my affiliates about the new setup.

So, I need, at least in some minor way, to have my own affiliate list.

I decided that the most effective way to do this is with a combination of a bit of custom PHP and Aweber.
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I decided, after downloading and fiddling with Google’s new browser this evening, that a pretty good test of its mettle would be to do some Entrecard dropping with it.

First, I should note that every site I went to rendered just fine. I’m sure that makes all the web designers in the world heave a big sigh of relief. The last thing anyone needed was another set of odd CSS hacks they needed to incorporate into their designs.

It was also fast. Although there’s no Linky-like feature in Chrome, and I had to individually middle-click each link to load it in a new tab, there was absolutely no delay or stuttering while I did so. All the new tabs loaded happily on the screen. Unlike Firefox, which has scrolling arrows when you get too many tabs, Chrome just makes the tabs smaller, so when you’ve got lots loaded, it looks like a goofy looking mountain range at the top of the screen.

The biggest thing I noticed was that, even while the last sites were still loading, there was no delay when clicking the widget. You clicked the word Drop, and the next instant the Thanks, or Awesome was there.

Just to make sure this wasn’t just caused by a superfast Entrecard server tonight, I dropped my last 50 cards in Firefox. There’s a 6-8 second period where the yellow bar goes black in Firefox when some of the tabs have not finished loading.

The other thing I noticed is that when a script on someone’s site causes major malfunctions, Firefox closes completely, while Chrome just crashes the tab and keeps everything else running normally.

Actually, it doesn’t crash the tab, it just makes it unhappy. You gotta love those Google guys. Even a crashed web page becomes cute.

Finally, the extra screen space with Chrome might have also sped up the process, since I could see more of the widgets above the fold.

Overall, I really like Chrome. I am just hoping to see lots of cool add-ons like Firefox has.

Yesterday I created a simple (very, very simple) script to allow Clickbank merchants to redirect their hoplink to different products.

This is beneficial because it allows you to run affiliate programs for up to 50 products from one account, without creating a distracting intermediary page listing all your products. Running all your programs from one account also will increase the gravity of your account, making it look more appealing to affiliates in the Clickbank marketplace.

Today I’m going to create a script to go along with yesterdays redirection code to fix another problem I have with Clickbank. It’s nice to have a lot of affiliates linking to your products, but they’re not really linking to you. They’re linking to hop.clickbank.net.

Since we’re already giving affiliates custom codes to link to our products, why not add a second redirection script so that those custom affiliate codes give us the link love instead of Clickbank?

Yesterday we created a file called hop.php, and once we were done, our affiliate hoplink codes looked a little like this:

http://AFFILIATE.PUBLISHER.hop.clickbank.net/?prod=1

Today, we’re going to create a file called go.php which will bounce visitors to the correct hoplink from our site. The hoplink directs those visitors to hop.php back on our domain, and hop.php directs them to the correct sales page, wherever that may be. If the average visitor even had a clue how much jumping around they were doing in the background, they’d feel a little bit like Tigger. Fortunately it will generally be instantaneous and invisible to most users.
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